129 comments:

Here's my standard reminder... don't post the answer or any hints that could lead directly to the answer (e.g. via a chain of thought, or an internet search) before the deadline of Thursday at 3pm ET. If you know the answer, click the link and submit it to NPR, but don't give it away here.

You may provide indirect hints to the answer to show you know it, but make sure they don't give the answer away. You can openly discuss your hints and the answer after the Thursday deadline. Thank you.

Will said on the air that (I forget his exact words) he thought the puzzle to be a hard, formidable one. Not the simplest example within his corpus of so many puzzles, but I found it to be pretty easy and got it in a few minutes.

I am traveling, so I am a week behind (the New York Times (NYT) syndicated Sunday puzzle is published one week after it is in the NYT). Last week's (12/21/14) NYT puzzle and the NPR puzzle were related. In the NYT, the 46 down clue was "Some Christmas decorations" and the answer was "Hollies". The NPR answer was "Halle Berry / Holly Berry".

(Blaine, put your finger near your “blog administrator ejector button. Other Blainesvillians, be on “Harriet Alert” in case Blaine is actually living his life for a spell.)

It is an odd puzzle, Sarah Rose, odder than almost every other puzzle NPR puts out there; not even the infamous “upside-down digital clock puzzle” was this odd. But not even this one is that difficult. You can count on that. You can solve it if you are able to see the forest for the trees.

Wills hint said not to scramble letters so I haven't done that. I've written them in all caps and all lower cases. Are all the letters symmetrical? No. I've looked at them in a mirror. Ooh, maybe they're all made of element symbols on the periods table. No. Palindromes? No. Been doing the puzzle for about a year. This has me stumped. The comments are absolutely no help.

Are all the letters used with one hand when typed in a standard keyboard? Maybe if you remove all vowels you are left with a common acronym. Perhaps they're all anagrams of precious metals. Wait, you shouldn't have to scramble.

I wonder if all of us " greenies" can get Brownie points if we, let's say, go solar or buy a hybrid or something? And, to SarahRose, maybe my dear cat can help your with the French phrase she often utters when I cannot solve these puzzles: "Ne laissez pas pourrir votre vie! Good luck!

Paul, I met a little boy on Christmas Eve who told his teacher "I'm Jewish" so he didn't have to sit on Santa's lap at school. The next day, the teacher apologized to his surprised mom for not including him in the menorah lighting earlier. The little guy figured saying that was the easiest way to not have to sit on some old guy's lap.

I don't think it behooves any of us to become unhinged over such trivial things.

All joking aside, my uncle (my father's much younger brother by 15 years) who is now about to turn 91 was in a home in a town they had just taken and was searching in a drawer when he heard a click behind him. He instantly turned around as he drew the .45 pistol from the quick draw holster he had removed from a wounded colonel and saw a fat German officer standing there with his luger still pointed directly at him. It had misfired, as they were prone to do when not properly cleaned. He had a look of horror on his face as my uncle fired several rounds into his body sending him face first to the floor like a door off his hinges as my uncle described it.

The last time I talked with my uncle was several months ago and he recounted how he was wounded the first time. He had been firing at and picking off numerous German soldiers one by one and his commander sent him on a mission into the town where he was hit in the back but didn't know it. His mission was to bring reinforcements which he was unable to do, but a Russian officer noticed blood was coming from his back. He gave my uncle his great coat after they patched him up a bit and sent him back to his unit. At the end of this telling my uncle said, "I killed a lot of Germans that day." The round that hit him had not penetrated, but had broken the skin on his back.

All joking aside, skydiveboy, I wish you and your uncle (and anybody reading this, frankly) a happy and prosperous 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, ... you get the picture.

I seem to recall a story about my grandfather injuring himself rather severely in the foot with an ax, and not realizing it until he saw the blood pouring out. Apocryphal, and/or anecdotal, perhaps. At any rate, give your uncle my best (I know, difficult enough trying to find any good in me, let alone figuring out what's best).My comment about Santa and cookies was actually another 'brownie pointer', and, as luck would have it, the ':]' clip does pertain.

Paul,Thanks, and of course, I wish you and all a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR! too.

I looked for a BP in your post, but still don't see it.

I forgot part of the story I posted last night, and when I awoke this morning it came to me. My uncle was not actually hit by a bullet, but he said something about it hitting his rifle, or maybe he said it hit the leather sling, and it pushed the weapon into his back causing the skin to open and the blood to flow, but he was not aware of his injury until the Russian officer pointed it out to him. I remember many years ago I ran into a WWII vet who was telling about his several beach landings during the war and saw a German fire at him as he was advancing on the beach. So he ran just to the left and dove over some sandbags for protection and then managed to shoot and kill the soldier who had, it turned out, shot him in the stomach, but he did not know until after he had killed the guy. Adrenaline!

Yeah, I think he said it was five, but not all were under fire. It was at least five and I too thought it was a lot. My uncle was fortunate to dock at Marseille and simply walk off the ship. I guess he had a better travel agent.

“I usually don't ask, but this time I think I may need an assist in order to solve this one.”

ASSIST >>> ASS (And yes, ron, I did notice your: ARSE was hanging out a bit. I didn’t want to say so at the time because I thought both your and benmar’s posts were giving too much away. Sorry benmar, but no apology for you from me this time.

My hints:“Cadabras? Cadavers?This puzzle is not lifting that is heavier. It does not provoke grunts.”If there are BaRbArIaNs, there must be bArBaRiAnS, and if there are ABRAS there must be CADABRAS, and if there are toes, brains, abs, hair and faces there must be a Cadavers. Grunts = GrUnTs. notlegoWhOtOiLs = WOOL

And, later:““The arc of your approach shot reminds me of Roy G. Biv!” Michelle’s playing partner exclaimed with a bellylaugh as her ball dribbled to a rest 10 yards short of the G.(LPGA golfer Michele Wie’s approach shot was RaInBoWlIkE (RIB WIE… the playing partner found Wie’s shot rib-tickling.)I can’t make one part of “peanut-butter-stickee” work, but an adjective defining that noun is a companion to Will’s “ambush…”“Peanut-butter-stickee” is the ROOF of the mouth. I can’t make a longer word out of “ROOF,” but the adjective LEAN-TO roof , or LeAnT-0S, or LATS, companion to ABS.“I recall, as on my preppy days (tHoSe = High School) I think back, the drone (“back, the drone” = aMbUsH backwars + HUM) of my trig teacher "monotoning" those crazy mixed-up functions (fIaNcEeS, unmixed = SINE). I more fondly imagine the words of the Magi (Magi{c} men say “bArBaRiAn CADABRA”) on that O Holy Night (hEaViEr = EVE).”

My hint to Sarah Rose, a half-hour after she figured out the answer. (I ought to page-refresh more often!):It is an odd puzzle, Sarah Rose, odder than almost every other puzzle NPR puts out there. … You can count on that. You can solve it if you are able to see the forest for the trees. (in other words, You've got to accentuate the positive (odd-numbered words)Eliminate the negative-numbered words (whatever those might be?... but also all even-numbered words)Latch on to the affirmative, (and)Don't mess with Mister In-Between

ecoarchitect,I applaud your idea of eponomy. Some kind of puzzling concept ought to be called a "Blaine." Perhaps a "Blaine" could be an "odd" or "even" "British-style" clue, as you suggest. Or perhaps, more BrOaDlY, a "Blaine" might just be "a really awesome clue...." such as his "Brownie(Brow-Knee!)/Points/Broadly = Bone/Pit/Body" trifecta this week.

Here are two more, courtesy of wolframalpha.com. I entered “a_r_m” and found “agrimi” which is, of course, another name for the kri-kri. I also found blueness and bluenose, but those are rather unshortzy examples.

I tried d_u_o_d_e_n_u_m and c_o_c_c_y_x, but found nothing. Those would have been cool.

Aha! The cheating tools surface. Your “arm” example used scrambledwordsolver.com and mine used wolframalpha.com. These crutches are little noted on this blog (wolframalpha was mentioned twice in 2011, but only for mathematical stuff—based on my analysis using “Search this site” and a Google search for “site:blainesville.com wolframalpha”).

I think it’s time for everyone to come clean and contribute to a compendium of contrafuzzling tools. I haven’t found a list online. A Google search of “word puzzle solve” is a start, but what do people really use?

The resulting compendium could be of some reference help to Will, since he has mentioned that he tries to find puzzles that are not easily solved by computer (while constating that any method of solving is fair play).

Will did good this time. I don’t think any online tool could have helped. It’s Saturday and we all are merely using the wordplay tools to find other examples of the original puzzle (which turns out to be a beast with four “arm”s.) And I don’t want any tools to help me tomorrow. It’ll be Wednesday night at 2am, when I know I’ll be fine if I get 4 hours, but pondering trumps sleep. I need this help in order to function on Thursdays. I hypothesize that U.S. productivity dips on Thursdays all because of that conniving Will Shortz.

OK, this beast has five arms. Following up on my earlier post, the “arm”s are Abram, aurum, agrimi, agrom, and A-frame. Mr. Shortz made a sentence out of his examples—a sentence that could even come true in 2015 on the steppes of Ukraine. These five “arm” examples would produce a sentence devoid of meaningful communication, however.

Next week's challenge: Last fall I posed a challenge in which you were asked to name a country, change one letter in it and rearrange the result to name a world capital. Then change a letter in that and rearrange the result to name another country. The answer was SPAIN to PARIS to SYRIA. Well, listener Andrew Chaikin of San Francisco has posed a related puzzle: Name a world capital. Change a letter in it and rearrange the result to name a country. Then change a letter in that and rearrange the result to name another world capital. What names are these?

Well, there's a difference between the puzzle page and what aired. Fortunately, that difference was not with the new puzzle for this week, but with the title and description of the on-air puzzle. The title of the puzzle page is "What's A Pirate's Favorite Radio Station? N-P-Arrr", and the description is: "Every answer is a word starting with the letters A-R, which you need to identify from its anagram." But on the air, he said the title was "BR-R", and that every answer would be a two-word phrase in which the first word started with BR and the second with R.

I have two 4-letter answers -- one with two letter-changes and one rearrangement, and the other with one letter-change and one rearrangement. I believe neither to be correct, and if the correct answer has five letters and nothing to do with music, I'm going to be very angry.

Gee, I have a 5-letter answer with nothing to do with music that I can think of. I've been to the country, heard of one capital and, frankly, never heard of the other. Maybe I should brush up on my music and my capitals.